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Tag: Power Settings

In a previous posting, I had remarked that the (famous) “Tasker” app has a 3rd-party plugin named “Secure Settings”, which has a sub-section named “Samsung ROM”, under which there is a function named “Enable / Disable Power Saving”.

The general context of this is, that Tasker is a task Acceleration / Automation tool, in which each Task is defined as a sequence of Actions, many of which are built-in, but some of which are Actions defined by 3rd-party plugins, such as by ‘Secure Settings’. Hence, it was a goal of mine to insert the Action into a Tasker Task, which would turn the Power Saving Mode on, on my “Samsung Galaxy S6″ phone.

I am Not Rooted.

This failed every time, and at first I thought the reason would be, that the author of ‘Secure Settings’ had failed to keep his module up-to-date with the latest Android Lollipop version, which my S6 is running.

But then another observation came to my attention.

The app “NFC Tools Pro”, and its companion, “NFC Tasks”, is also supposed to support, that an NFC Tag should enable Power Saving Mode on a Samsung Phone, when we tap the Tag. ‘NFC Tools Pro’ additionally has a mode in which it executes its Task as a test, before that Task has even been programmed into a Tag. And when I ran the test, this app was also unable to switch on Power Saving Mode.

In both cases the behavior is identical, in that the Action returns as a ‘success’ immediately (even though when I Enable Power Saving manually, it takes several seconds for this setting to kick in), but in that Power Saving Mode is not enabled – even later.

And so an inference which I am making about this feature, is that indeed the app developers are not up-to-date with the latest Samsung API – Only Because on the latest phones, one needs to be rooted in order for this command to work (!)

And so what I ended up doing both as an intended, future NFC Tag Task, and as a present Tasker Task, was simply to script a pop-up to appear, which states “Suggest to Enable (or Disable) Power Saving Mode Now.” It is a shame, that the whole procedure cannot be 100% automated, but I guess that Samsung has been very conscientious in its efforts to increase security. And denying ‘any old app’ permission to fiddle with the power settings in general, could be a step towards greater security.